Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland may have wowed audiences – it opened to a spectacular $210.3m global haul at the weekend – but the critics are divided over whether this latest reimagining of Lewis Carroll's famous stories is a worthy addition to the canon. Some suggest this is Alice seen through a disconcerting Hollywood action movie filter, with weak characterisation and tepid dialogue. Others are bowled over by the vivid imagery and a terrific performance by Helena Bonham Carter as the sinister, sickly sweet Red Queen. Meanwhile, Johnny Depp's performance as the Mad Hatter seems to delight and annoy in equal measure.

Burton's film sees Alice returning to Wonderland (now known, for some obscure reason, as Underland) as a 19-year-old, having almost forgotten her previous visit as a young girl many years before. Confused and embarrassed after being forced to turn down a marriage proposal in front of hundreds of assembled guests at a garden party, the teenager soon finds herself tumbling down the rabbit hole into an even more frustrating situation.

Not only is she required to eat and drink in order to shrink and grow herself to negotiate various obstacles in the Wonderland architecture, but the residents suspect she may be "the wrong Alice". Furthermore, those who do believe are keen to release Wonderland from the tyranny of the evil Red Queen by slaying the Jabberwocky. Alice's reaction to all of the above is a sort of resigned, callow exasperation – at least at first. To all intents and purposes, this is Kevin the Teenager in Wonderland.

Our own Peter Bradshaw, for one, is not impressed. "As ever, I can't rid myself of the feeling that for all the funkily crepuscular mood that Burton creates, this is a pretty conventional work," he complains. "There are some funny exchanges, particularly between the Red Queen and the Mad Hatter, but for me the weightless, frictionless, whimsical world of fantasy is often, frankly, dull."

"Any purists who argue that this Alice doesn't work because it strays so far from the text are wrong," writes Channel 4 Film's Catherine Bray. But she adds: "This Alice doesn't work for the far more essential reason that the characters are too often missing a basic lifeforce of their own, possibly a result of being enbalmed in stunning-looking but airless CGI. They're not helped by dialogue that feels like an afterthought to a long-planned series of conceptual character designs."

On the flipside, the Times's Kate Muir reckons "the kooky costumes and creepy fantasy landscapes have gestated brilliantly from Burton's drawing board into a 3D world with touches of the Avatar forest about it". She adds: "If you could ask Lewis Carroll to choose between Disney's saccharine Alice in Wonderland cartoon of 1951 and Tim Burton's new gothic monsterpiece, you feel the author would pick the nightmarish vision over the giant teacup rides in theme parks. While Burton has forsaken Carroll's narrative for a postmodern mash-up of Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and the Jabberwocky poem, his hallucinogenic humour stays true to the original."

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times is another (qualified) fan. "Alice plays better as an adult hallucination, which is how Burton rather brilliantly interprets it until a pointless third act flies off the rails," he writes. "Burton is above all a brilliant visual artist, and his film is a pleasure to regard."

It strikes me that if Carroll's original Alice in Wonderland was based on a deck of cards, with its sequel patterned on a game of chess, Burton's film most clearly resembles a giant theme park. All the characters one expects from a trip to Wonderland are present and correct, but too often they are larger-than-life representations of the originals who maintain very little of the magic that encouraged us to care about them in the first place. The film's art design is (fittingly) a thing of wonder, but as the Guardian's Xan Brooks has pointed out (in a positive review, it ought to be said), there is very little more to the movie than that.

I also think Burton has rounded up too many odd numbers from the original stories, and smoothed off rather too many pleasedly jagged edges. Carroll's tales had a dream-like quality, with episodes often dissolving into one another without any real resolution. A blockbuster movie, perhaps, requires firmer foundations, yet one can't help thinking that the "real Alice" ought to have been built on shifting sands.

Did you manage to catch Alice in Wonderland at the weekend? Do you agree with the critics who wish they had never fallen down this particular rabbit hole? Or is it one Burton that's well worth going for?

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